WASHINGTON: The advice for air travelers is ubiquitous: check your flight status before going to the airport. And that’s for good reason this week because it might not be until Saturday when you can comfortably count on your flight taking off as scheduled.<\/p>\n
“Flights won’t be running at full capacity until the weekend,” says David Castelveter, vice president of communications for the Air Transport Association of America. And that projection assumes this latest storm ends as forecasted on Wednesday and workers are then able clean up the tons of snow that’s been dumped on airports across the country.<\/p>\n
“When you have weather of this magnitude the unfortunate recognition is that there will be cancelled flights,” but Castelveter says airlines are very careful to prepare for the storm before the snow starts to fall.<\/p>\n
Preparation is also key for the people who run the airports that are crippled by the snow. Plows, blowers and heavy duty brooms will be in constant motion in the days ahead as workers putting in 12+ hour shifts will be busy keeping runways, taxi areas, gates and parking lots open.<\/p>\n
“The biggest problem you have at airports like Reagan National (outside Washington D.C.) and LaGuardia (in New York City) is where to stockpile the snow. You need trucks to come in and dump it off elsewhere,” says Jerry Fitzgerald, a 50 year veteran of airport operations and former director of aviation of the major New York City airports. He agrees with the assessment that normal flight service will not return until the weekend.<\/p>\n
Fitzgerald says airports start thinking about snowstorms in the summer as they plan their budgets and make sure they have access to the equipment necessary to best get their facilities back on line. Some heavy duty plows cost nearly a million dollars and can be found at some snow belt airports where snow is a part of life.<\/p>\n
From his days at New York’s JFK airport, Fitzgerald says he’d have 100 workers busy for several days after a storm to keep the runways and taxi areas clear. FAA regulations mandate that certain favorable ground conditions exist before flight operations can resume. Once the first flights land and take off, the pilots communicate back to the airport their thoughts on the shape of the runway. Since a missed icy patch could lead to disaster, Fitzgerald believes snow removal is “the most dangerous thing airports have to deal with.”<\/p>\n
In other less sensitive parts of the airport, Fitzgerald says there could be several thousand airport and contract workers busy clearing snow from gate and baggage areas and in the parking lots for airport employees and passengers. “Even if the runway is clear, it makes no sense to bring planes in if you have nowhere to park.”<\/p>\n
Well before the snow starts to fall, most airlines try to get as many people out of impacted areas and in the process leave as few planes behind to get stuck in snow-packed hangars. This allows the airlines to redirect their planes to other routes that are still operational.<\/p>\n
Once airports are able to open for some flights the real chaos of air travel begins. Airlines will have varying capacities for accommodating the backlog passengers who are anxious to get off the ground. Castelveter explains that most air carriers have long standing agreements with competitors to move ticketed passengers regardless of which company’s plane they board. <\/p>\n
Some airlines have also put into effect special emergency weather policies allowing passengers to change their bookings without normal fees. But not everyone who was trying to fly will end up taking off. Castelveter explains that many ticketholders are business travelers who don’t rebook or vacation travelers who end up missing important connections on other flights or cruise ships that have left port. These people simply give up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: The advice for air travelers is ubiquitous: check your flight status before going to the airport. And that’s for good reason this week because it might not be until Saturday when you can comfortably count on your flight taking off as scheduled. “Flights won’t be running at full capacity until the weekend,” says David […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}